Re: More women in key positions ?
After explaining we have an impressive ratio of female to male participants in the Debian project as a whole (not just technical), your suggestion is to get more women involved generally with Debian (still not technically)? Did I miss something, it seems if anything it would make more sense to say we need more women in CS/IT generally after your first claim... One of the great things about the internet and a project like this is that personalities and qualifications come forward without the ability to judge based on their physical image- whether racial or gender related. Maybe we should find ways to capitalize on this so as to reduce the chances for someone to be judged bases on a name or their designated gender- reduce chances for this to be communicates and emphasize content of the work- what is being done over who is behind the work. On Mar 26, 2015, at 20:21, Mehdi Dogguy me...@dogguy.org wrote: Hi, Le 2015-03-21 03:50, Charles Plessy a écrit : You probably noted that no woman was candidate this year, and that no woman was appointed to the technical committee in the recent replacements. Do you think that it is a problem that there are no women in key positions in Debian ? If yes, what do you plan to ameliorate the situation as a DPL ? I think that the question is much more large than that. I'd like to point out the fact that we already do have some women in key positions, and with highly important role (Front Desk, DebConf chair, Publicity team, ...). We may have technical subjects in mind but Debian is a big project and there are other non-technical aspects. The number of women we have in key positions is even remarkable when we take the ratio of active women in the project. IMHO, the question is rather why we don't have more women involved in Debian? ... and there are many factors. There are social and cultural factors about which Debian can't do much. For the rest, it is not new that there are very few women in the free software community. Initiatives like Outreachy (or rather OPW) showed great results and we expect the same in our community. We introduced the Code of Conduct and the Diversity statement. Both make Debian a more welcoming project. We should also take great care of keeping women who are participating. -- Mehdi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/08866c301eb1e170d8b56cc3aa583...@dogguy.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/d3c60306-c7a1-42a3-a425-7fc48052f...@gmail.com
Re: More women in key positions ?
In order for the TC to recommend someone, they must first be nominated and accept, or nominate themselves. Claiming that the lack of women on the TC can be resolved simply by forcing the TC to do so is simplistic. It also seems to me to be insulting to the many highly skilled women in Debian with whom I would be happy to serve on the TC with, had they been interested in serving. Hi Don, I am well aware of how the TC works, and in particular I have been contacting people in private to encourage them to nominate themselves. If the discussion here would be about reforming the TC, I would propose that the nominations should be public, just as for the DPL election. In that way, it would be more obvious to everybody when no woman is candidate. However, the topic here is the DPL election, hence my question is focused on what the DPL can do, and one possible action is to use the appointment process to push for more women in the TC. This push can be as hard as refusing any appointment, but it can also be as soft as delaying the decision for one month, and sending one motivational email asking for more women as candidates. In that sense, I am not asking the DPL to force anything. But if the DPL could put a little bit of formal involvement into helping the TC to have women members, I think that it would be a great signal. Have a nice day, (PS: Please CC me, I am not subscribed) -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150331000151.ga30...@falafel.plessy.net
Re: More women in key positions ?
bjf...@gmail.com writes: One of the great things about the internet and a project like this is that personalities and qualifications come forward without the ability to judge based on their physical image- whether racial or gender related. Maybe we should find ways to capitalize on this so as to reduce the chances for someone to be judged bases on a name or their designated gender- reduce chances for this to be communicates and emphasize content of the work- what is being done over who is behind the work. This is a common suggestion and, on the surface, has a lot to recommend it. After all, if the goal is to eliminate sexism (and racism, and similar bigotries) as much as possible, shouldn't we just treat everyone exactly the same and completely ignore such characteristics? And that is, indeed, what a lot of women prefer. The limitation to this approach (which, let me be clear, doesn't undermine the idea entirely) is that men, and white men in particular, are the unremarked normal in most (not all) of the societies that contribute people to our project. This has a subtle but persistent effect: treating everyone the same rarely translates into treating everyone by the pure average of all the possible cultures, genders, and other variations in the world. Rather, treating everyone the same almost always, without a lot of very careful attention, translates into treating everyone like the unremarked normal. In other words, treating everyone like men (and usually like white men). This isn't always bad. Some women strongly prefer this. But other women don't, and don't find this as welcoming as it's intended to be. Not everyone wants to be treated like one of the boys and have their gender erased, even with the best of intentions towards an ideal of equality. And men are often oblivious to the drawbacks of this, since they don't *realize* they're treating people with gendered assumptions. They're following the golden rule: they're treating people the way that they would want to be treated, and obviously they're perfectly comfortable being treated like the unremarked normal of white men, since that's who they are. It takes some practice and attention to even realize there's an often significant difference between treating everyone like men and treating everyone equally while respecting their actual identities. I think it's fair to say that the general feeling among the folks who think about equality and diversity issues a lot is that the X-blind culture concept, which is roughly what you were referring to, was a useful blunt instrument to get us past the era where women were fired when they got married because of course married women shouldn't work and should be raising children. But that type of obvious, blantant sexism -- which can be fought with obvious, blatant concepts of equality -- is mostly gone (thankfully!). That doesn't mean there's no sexism left, as one can see from the sad statistics about diversity within the project. Rather, it means that what's left is subtle, and difficult, and complicated, and is not particularly amenable to this sort of blunt solution. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/871tk5vq5h@hope.eyrie.org
Re: More women in key positions ?
Hmm, my suggestion wasn't to treat everyone the same, that doesn't seem reasonable or like a good way to achieve our goals. Rather, it was to blur the way identities are formed - from having male or female names with male and female personalities and roles to focusing on the content of our work and forming communication and identity around this - maybe this could start with a simple change to how names are handled - instead of using your real name, you have to pick a username. It would seem wrong to intentionally prevent someone from picking a manly or girly name - but I would hope this would at least offer some women the chance to pick neutral names and not give away their identities without having to assume a male identity as you're mentioning. As a software engineer, I see the women trying to become one of the boys as you mention pretty often, they either do this or assume a less technical role (as if only men can have technical positions). But if you remove the ability to tell whether your collaborators are male or female, and create a culture of focusing on generating personal identities or social status based on qualities other than birth-name, gender, race, etc., such as what project you work on, your strengths, or what you find rewarding in life, you might find someday your collaborators are a mix of women and men without ever realizing it - the stereotype of the white male contributor thinned out without anyone knowing. Creating a sort of anonymity isn't going to be easy- people will want to identify themselves as male or female naturally, as it's a part of how we distinguish ourselves in the outside world. This could ruin a plan like this - but I like the idea nonetheless on the principle of it. It provides opportunity where currently we have stereotypes, and it might still have some positive consequences, even if not radical. I think the culture in general (not just with Debian) will have to change from one in which only white men fulfil technical roles (where QA is apparently the only exception) to one in which gender and race play little to no role. However, we can take more of a stance without outright we need women - which seems artificial and not true to the heart of the problem. Reducing personal identity in the leadership might help too - if there is no face with a name, and a name is nothing but a designator that reflects a personality more than a body, it's easier to look at a project and not immediately think I'm alone here - everyone else is a white male. Think - even now you can research who is serving whatever leadership role on wikipedia - once they're high enough up. You generally find the project is lead by some white guy, which isn't surprising. But what if you couldn't do this, because the name of the leader was something like Cloud or something... Eh, this wouldn't work - people cling too closely to the way things have always worked and would name themselves according to their social structure separate from the project (either with a name which designates gender in some way, or with things that men traditionally associate themselves with - gamertags are a good example, if you play games, you can still tell a male's handle from a female's...) Hopefully all of this rambling has inspired thoughts that might be actually useful? Anyone? On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:47 PM, Russ Allbery r...@debian.org wrote: bjf...@gmail.com writes: One of the great things about the internet and a project like this is that personalities and qualifications come forward without the ability to judge based on their physical image- whether racial or gender related. Maybe we should find ways to capitalize on this so as to reduce the chances for someone to be judged bases on a name or their designated gender- reduce chances for this to be communicates and emphasize content of the work- what is being done over who is behind the work. This is a common suggestion and, on the surface, has a lot to recommend it. After all, if the goal is to eliminate sexism (and racism, and similar bigotries) as much as possible, shouldn't we just treat everyone exactly the same and completely ignore such characteristics? And that is, indeed, what a lot of women prefer. The limitation to this approach (which, let me be clear, doesn't undermine the idea entirely) is that men, and white men in particular, are the unremarked normal in most (not all) of the societies that contribute people to our project. This has a subtle but persistent effect: treating everyone the same rarely translates into treating everyone by the pure average of all the possible cultures, genders, and other variations in the world. Rather, treating everyone the same almost always, without a lot of very careful attention, translates into treating everyone like the unremarked normal. In other words, treating everyone like men (and usually like white men). This isn't always bad. Some women strongly prefer this.
